Operations Engine

HCL Technologies Management Tools Analysis

Name
Dhruv Sharma Daphne Rodrigues Neha Kumari Rishabh Mittal Shashi Ranjan PGP 2012-2014 IILM, Lodhi Road

Roll No.
PG20121306 PG20121720 PG20121374 PG20121664 PG20121393

HCL Capacity & Inventory

HCL Technologies have employed primarily two techniques for the management of their inventory and ensuring that capacity is adequate. These two techniques are Vendor-Managed Inventory and Agora, which is a service delivery platform developed by HCL technologies. Now VMI, is an inventory planning and fulfillment technique where a vendor is the one who is responsible for monitoring customer needs. The vendor is the one who, as and when required, ensures that supply is made available by contacting the supplier. In this way the vendor gains direct access, and often, ownership of the merchandise that has to be sold to the customer. The benefit of this process is that it reduces wastage of inventory and brings the distributor and the vendor close together, ensuring consistence in performance. Another process used by HCL is Agora. This is a cloud based service that allows fulfillment of requirements in real time. Instead of providing a separate software package it provides a software service that can be accessed via internet through a cloud computing platform, enabling services to be rendered far away from where they originate, and that too as and when the requirement comes up. This is another way in which cost is cut, as software packages need not be published and packaged to be sold, as well as reduces wastage, as the service is used only when there is a requirement, no inventories are kept. Following are a few details on the two processes used that we came across during our secondary research phase.

Agora1
Agora - Service Delivery Platform for Subscription Based Businesses The world over, companies are looking to move away from traditional ways of doing business to subscription based models. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are providing their software in the services model. A new breed of Managed Service Providers is looking to provide ondemand IT and Infrastructure management services remotely from the cloud, challenging their more traditional rivals. Enterprises are moving to centralized shared IT services delivered from the cloud. The promise of steady revenue streams and access to new markets of consumers and
1

Agora - Service Delivery Platform for Subscription Based Businesses, http://www.hcltech.com/services/cloudcomputing/intellectual-properties/agora

small and medium sized businesses is making subscription based offerings a must for all businesses. It is not all rosy though. Building a successful online subscription business involves making sure that a number of things work for customers. Metering usage, processing payments, monitoring service performance - the list is long and complex. HCL's proprietary solution AGORA is the only one of its kind in the market that provides complete metering, billing and monitoring solutions for software provided as a service. The unique advantage of Agora is that customers can plug in their products and services and immediately start delivering products on subscription. Meter and Price the usage of consumed Service Do you bill by the hour? The week? Or by number of transactions? What if you want to switch between different billing units? Do you reconfigure your entire system? Metering and Pricing Automate Usage Data collection and Collation for pricing Convert Usage into any required units Minimize revenue leakage and Quickly monetize by choosing amongst several pre-set and customizable pricing models based on: o Usage o Transactions o One-time, Recurring/Rental # of devices managed or User using the Service o Configurable rate cards and Trial

Bill the consumed Service, accept and process payments Are your customers spread across the world? Do they like paying online? What do you do if someone signs up in the middle of the month? What if your customer's credit card reaches its limit? How do you handle tax?

Billing & Payment processing Bill your customers in any Currency Accurately tax by setting up the global tax rules

Accept payments via payment gateways and possess capability of processing multiple payment methods Launch Packages and Offers in your consumer market Incorporate prorate, discounts and delinquency charges in your bill Customizable Invoice generation and Bill presentment

Manage Customer on-boarding process & entire subscription portfolio How will you sign on customers and support them? How will you ensure data security when you have multiple companies using the same service? How will you market new services to old customers?

Tenant and Subscription Management Entire Customer lifecycle management functions such as: o Zero touch customer on-boarding o Instantly create Services Marketplace and quickly launch service plans either directly or through partners o Integrated Customer Support o Automated and manual notifications o Customer specific usage reporting and analysis Completely address security and compliance concerns such as secure database access, single sign on etc Notify your customers automatically for various Customer related events Advertize new services across customers and quickly monetize the launch through effective Campaign Management

Provision the Service to the Customer and maintain Data Isolation Does your application require code changes to support Multi-tenancy? Have you given thought to scaling up to match a growing customer base?

Service Provisioning Create Multi-instance using XEN Virtualization SOA based Multi-Tenant architecture to support Automatic/ Manual Tenant Provisioning in the chosen Application Instance No Code Change required Load Balancing & Capacity Management

Add and manage both hardware & software components alike

Enable distribution channel to market and sell the services through Partners Will you be able to leverage partners to tap the market? What if your partner can mix & match and sell your services? How will your partner incentive systems be managed?

Channel/ Partner Enablement Enable and manage n-tier distribution channel Categorize and define your partner and reseller models such as: o Customized Resource Model o Fixed resource model o Combination models You can choose to let your partner white label, co-brand or re-brand, value add or launch their own Services Marketplace Manage partner commissions effectively according to existing contracts Automated propagation of Notifications, Metering information to Partner and consolidated partner billing

Effectively manage Customers and its subscriptions by Customer Self Service Portal Are support costs an inhibitor? How will you ensure that your customers are legitimate? What about managing customer who default on your terms

Subscriber Management & Self-Service Customer Self Service Portal for self registration, subscribing to available service plans and offers and raise & track trouble tickets through integrated Customer Support Customer can assign, define and manage roles to his Users Fraud screening mechanism for black or white-listing Customers and managing fraud accounts Set up delinquency rules for managing Customers who default terms and conditions

VMI at HCL Technologies2

HCL Technologies, a leading provider of and pioneer of trenchless technology, faced challenges of fast growth and rapid expansion. Their flagship Insituform process of pipe reconstruction led to 100% revenue growth projection in five years, 65% user growth, and expansion across the globe. This business success led to IT infrastructure quickly becoming inadequate for supporting the companys future growth. The IT infrastructure group was facing challenging objectives: Support dynamic business growth with a reduced percentage of IT budget Gradually replace the existing legacy technology without major IT investments Develop an effective storage solution to support the projected usage growth (storage needs were expected to grow from 3 to 100 TB in three years) Finally, an existing leasing arrangement for a significant piece of hardware was approaching expiration, leading to a natural decision point. Proposed solution HCL proposed scalable VMI-based storage management solution with PayPer-Use (PPU) pricing, which included: Legacy migration to latest, more flexible technology, including a transition from server-based storage to SAN1 Effective postponement of investment in the storage infrastructure through the ability to invest in the hardware depending on the short-term requirement rather than a long-term forecast Reduction in the risk of IT investments through the ability to scale storage up and down, reflecting the evolving nature of the IT architecture and business needs Optimal asset utilization throughout the lifecycle of the contract Overall reduction of 37% of the current costs over 3 years through offshoring of infrastructure management services HCL managed to support this flexibility through a partnership with Sun Microsystems. This partnership enabled hardware Pay-Per-Use (PPU) and joint implementation for VMI principles in the storage management.

VENDOR-MANAGED INVENTORY IN IT, Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO Ross Tisnovsky, Vice President, Everest Research Institute

Conclusion
HCL Technologies over the years has brought out new ways of doing things within the organization as well as new methods that may be of service to their clients. Technologies such as Business Process Management and HCL Management Tools and Services have provided an easier way for the company and its clients to manage their affairs. Inventory and Capacity management techniques like Agora and VMI have enabled them to reduce their physical stocks instead focusing on directly dealing with clients through cloud based software services, and their VMI approach has enabled them to know about customer requirements with more precision as their ties with vendors strengthened. Enabling quality management techniques have allowed them to improve their functioning but not all too well as they were faced with the problem of less frequent innovation and the techniques they used werent all too new or game changing. If they focus on getting major deals by creating something absolutely unique they may be able to become even bigger on a global scale. HCL Technologies has the potential to grow much bigger than it already is and will be reaching new heights.

References
http://www.hcltech.com/engineering-rd-services/agora http://www.hcltech.com/services/cloud-computing/intellectual-properties/agora http://www.hcltech.com/blogs/ideathon-2012/unleashing-true-potential-supply-chainmanagement-vmi-approach VENDOR-MANAGED INVENTORY IN IT, Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO Ross Tisnovsky, Vice President, Everest Research Institute http://www.hcltech.com/enterprise-transformation-services/middleware-soaservices/business-process-management-services http://www.hcltech.com/services/cloud-computing/intellectual-properties/mtaas